– 135 – holiday reading

Amongst all the wedding preparations, the ridiculous and unnecessary amount of food, the heat and the sock knitting (more about that at a later stage) I did manage to get my reading mojo back and read three really good books.

This first one totally floored me.

Mae gets her dream job at ‘The Circle, a hugely powerful internet company which links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. … What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge. (from Good Reads)

Oh my. I couldn’t put it down … the irony of talking about this on social media is not lost on me but… you have to read it… at every step you’ll tell yourself… yes, this makes sense, I understand this could be good.. and then suddenly you realise how scary it all is, how possible it would be for this to happen and it’s terrifying. Terrifying! It’s a utopia turned dystopia in a big way. It’s the end for the world as we know it. It so could be!

I’d make it compulsory in every secondary school.

(On the down side I don’t think it’s as well written as ‘A heartbreaking work of staggering genius’… there are some, mercifully short, dogdy love scenes for example that are very non-believable… but maybe it’s just me.)

Next up is my yearly summer date with the Commissario Montalbano and the going ons in his fictional Sicilian village of Vigata. I’ve read all of them and they’re the perfect summer read. (There are English translations of the novels, worth checking them out)

And last but not least…

I liked the book. Didn’t ‘love’ it. Liked it. I loved the metaphor of the underground railway as a real, physical entity/journey whatever you want to call it. I thought that it was very clever how Cora’s escape takes us on that journey through various US states and different situtations/experience – all be it all pretty horrific. What I wasn’t too sure about was the language. It didn’t draw me in. I didn’t ‘feel’ it. I found it all in all quite cold almost. I felt I was left on the outside looking in… rather than fully participating most of the time. (Not always). I wanted the characters Cora, Caesar to be talking to me more, for me to get to know them more. I mean Caesar just vanishes from the story…

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good book, definitively worth reading, but maybe I’ve been spoilt by Toni Morrison who makes me cry and turns me inside out ever single time.